Purgatorio, Canto XV

This canto begins with another instance of the pilgrim’s being struck by wonder — that is, by a blast of light that nearly blinds him. It means that an angel is approaching. Virgil comforts Dante:

“Don’t be surprised if you can still be dazed
by members of the Heavenly Court,” he said.
“This is our invitation to ascend.

Not long from now, a sight like this will prove
to be no burden, but a joy as great
as Nature has prepared your soul to feel.”

We’ve been hearing this again and again on this journey: don’t worry, this is hard, but you’ll get used to it, and eventually you’ll take joy in it. Why do you think Virgil keeps repeating it, and Dante (the poet) keeps having his fictive self blinded by the light? Virgil has to make this point again and again to his pupil because Dante is in a state of transition, and it’s frightening to him. He is metaphorically dying to himself, and is becoming a new creature. His master, Virgil, is coaching him and encouraging him to keep going. You might say that he’s pastoring Dante. Second, as we’ve seen, Dante, in typical medieval fashion, uses light as a metaphor for acquiring wisdom and holiness. The wiser and more holy the pilgrim becomes, the more he is able to bear God’s brilliance. He still has a long way to go, though. Christ said in the Gospels (Matthew 6:22):

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.”

The journey up the mountain of Purgatory, and ascending through the heaven, is about making the eyes healthier, so they can behold more light, and thereby allow the body to be filled with light and healed — which is to say, fully restored in unity with God. The ease with which the pilgrim Dante is blinded by theophany — God’s showing His glory, as in the face of His angels — is a metaphor for Dante’s spiritual weakness.

As we know from the terrace of Pride, Dante’s “graduation” to the next stage of spiritual progress is marked by the appearance of an angel, who removes a P from his forehead, and invites him to ascend to the next terrace up. We don’t see it happen here, but learn later in the canto that it has happened.

The heart of this canto is Virgil’s explanation for what Guido said in Canto XIV — see yesterday’s post — in his denunciation of the corrupt people of the Arno river valley for their Envy:

O race of men, why do you set your hearts
on things that of necessity cannot be shared?

In today’s Canto, Dante asks Virgil to tell him what Guido meant by that. Virgil’s explanation is a gloss on this passage from Matthew, Chapter 6, two lines of which I just quoted:

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

Virgil explains that Envy emerges when people fix their eyes and set their hearts on the things of this world, not the things of heaven. If their disposition is to make earthly things — the acquisition of riches, or of power, and hating those who have more of those things than they do — then they will dwell in darkness. Purgatory, remember is not a place where sins are punished — that is hell — but where dispositions toward particular sins are corrected. This is why Dante is here: to learn to see and to desire the things of heaven. Says Virgil:

But if your love were for the lofty sphere,

your cravings would aspire for the heights,

and fear of loss would not oppress your heart;

the more there are up there who speak of ‘ours,’

the more each one possesses and the more

Charity burns intensely in that realm.”

Charity — caritas, the self-giving form of love — is the governing principle of heaven. Souls who burn with caritas love God above all, and through the grace of God, their neighbors above themselves. Envy destroys charity; envy exiles God from one’s heart. Dante still doesn’t quite get it, though. He asks Virgil how a single good shared by many makes all who have it richer than if it were held exclusively only by a few? Virgil tut-tuts his pupil, telling him he’s still stuck in worldly habits of thinking, therefore “from the true light you reap only the dark.” He continues:

That infinite, ineffable true Good

that dwells in Heaven speeds instantly to love,

as light rays to a shining surface would;

just as much ardor as it finds, it gives:

the greater the proportion of our love,

the more eternal goodness we receive;

the more souls there above who are in love

the more there are worth loving; love grows more,

each soul a mirror mutually mirroring.

This is so beautiful, and so profound. It must be conceded that the simile depends on a misunderstanding of the physics of light: the belief that light is attracted to light. It also depends on a misunderstanding of economics: the idea that there is a finite amount of wealth in the world, and that one person’s gain necessarily comes at the expense of others. Nevertheless, there is much spiritual truth here. There is something about the nature of love, says Virgil, that breeds potentially boundless increase. Because God is Love, and He is infinite, the more we open our hearts to His love, the more light dwells in us, flowing out of us into our neighbors, and from them back into ourselves. Giuseppe Mazzotta explains:

This image thus leads us to the generative idea of charity, that is to say the idea that charity produces more charity. It has the power of generate itself and multiply itself. This is the principle of mercy for Dante. The whole of creation is sending back light, without any loss of its original light. This is the metaphysics of Dante’s mirror. The world exists, therefore, on the basis of mercy, and not from the point of view of envy, from which we do not even see the light in the first place. Charity completely allows for a God who creates without envy and with generosity.

Isn’t that marvelous? And look, it’s not simply beautiful poetry and inspiring moral theology; there’s a scientific basis for charity — altruistic love — generating more of itself. Stephen G. Post is a bioethicist and academic researcher (SUNY-Stonybrook), a man I got to know somewhat when I worked at the Templeton Foundation. Dr. Post has made the study of altruism his life’s work. Here he is on Big Think with a 3-minute video delving into what science tells us about the physiological benefits of altruism. From the transcript:

When people are less focused on self and the problems of the self, there is a kind of alleviation of stress. There’s nothing like reaching out and contributing to the lives of others to give a person, first of all a sense of significance and purpose. The idea of the helper’s high has been around since the early 1990’s. Allen Lukes, a psychologist, had individuals going out and helping others in various ways, at low thresholds, a couple of hours of activity at a soup kitchen or helping down the block or whatever it might be. And about half of the individuals, and this is a kind of half full/half empty paradigm, reported a feeling of elation; a kind of emotional buoyancy, if you will. Forty-three percent reported a sense of warmth and tranquility. Certainly many of them reported a sense of significance and meaning in life. And interestingly, even 13 percent said they felt an alleviation of chronic aches and pains.

Now since then, scientists have been studying this care and connection axis in human nature and know that it involves certain hormones, like oxytocin, sometimes called the compassion hormone. Oxytocin is related not only to compassion, but also to feelings of tranquility or serenity, if you will, and also to social trust.

This is true. Paul J. Zak is a neuroscientist and economist whom I also got to know a bit through Templeton circles. Dr. Zak is best known for his work on oxytocin, which he’s dubbed the “moral molecule.” He’s proved in the lab that the presence of oxytocin in the brain has dramatic effects on social trust and morality. Here, in a TED talk, he explains his discoveries:

So oxytocin is the trust molecule, but is it the moral molecule? Using the oxytocin inhaler, we ran more studies. We showed that oxytocin infusion increases generosity in unilateral monetary transfers by 80 percent. We showed it increases donations to charity by 50 percent. We’ve also investigated non-pharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin. These include massage, dancing and praying. Yes, my mom was happy about that last one. And whenever we raise oxytocin, people willingly open up their wallets and share money with strangers.

But why do they do this? What does it feel like when your brain is flooded with oxytocin? To investigate this question, we ran an experiment where we had people watch a video of a father and his four year-old son, and his son has terminal brain cancer. After they watched the video, we had them rate their feelings and took blood before and after to measure oxytocin. The change in oxytocin predicted their feelings of empathy. So it’s empathy that makes us connect to other people. It’s empathy that makes us help other people. It’s empathy that makes us moral.

More Zak:

Now this idea is not new. A then unknown philosopher named Adam Smith wrote a book in 1759 called “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” In this book, Smith argued that we are moral creatures, not because of a top-down reason, but for a bottom-up reason. He said we’re social creatures, so we share the emotions of others. So if I do something that hurts you, I feel that pain. So I tend to avoid that. If I do something that makes you happy, I get to share your joy. So I tend to do those things. Now this is the same Adam Smith who, 17 years later, would write a little book called “The Wealth of Nations” — the founding document of economics. But he was, in fact, a moral philosopher, and he was right on why we’re moral. I just found the molecule behind it. But knowing that molecule is valuable, because it tells us how to turn up this behavior and what turns it off. In particular, it tells us why we see immorality.

So, in a very real sense, neuroscience shows what Dante the Christian poet knew 700 years ago. But here’s something Dante — a great poet, but a lousy economist — did not know, but an economist like Adam Smith figured out four centuries later, and scientists like Paul Zak demonstrated in our time. From Zak’s TED talk:

I studied one single virtue: trustworthiness. Why? I had shown in the early 2000s that countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous. So in these countries, more economic transactions occur and more wealth is created, alleviating poverty. So poor countries are by and large low trust countries. So if I understood the chemistry of trustworthiness, I might help alleviate poverty.

In other words, the more you invest in caritas, the more you and others prosper spiritually, and the more everyone prospers materially. This isn’t theology, or at least isn’t only theology; it’s also science.

And it’s in Dante.

What the pilgrim’s experience on the terrace of Envy reveals is how corrosive Envy, the opposite of Charity, is to social trust. We begin by despising our neighbor for having what we don’t have. If we don’t repent, and if others repay our envy with envy and spite, we may end by destroying social trust, the common good, and the basis for our own prosperity, and condemning our children and their children to dwell in darkness and poverty.

Back on the mountain, on the next terrace up — the terrace of Wrath — Dante finds himself suddenly within a vision. He’s standing in a temple, in a crowd of people, and spies a lady whispering tenderly to a boy, “My son, why hast Thou dealt with us this way? You see, thy father and I, both of us in tears, have searched for Thee.”

This, of course, is the Virgin Mary, finding her lost son Jesus preaching in the Temple in Jerusalem. She did not react to his running away with wrath, but with gentleness, with meekness. As we’ve seen, the journey on each terrace begins with examples of the virtue the purgation there will help one acquire. Next, he sees the grieving and angry mother of a teenage girl caught with another boy, trying to shame her husband, Pisistratus, the benevolent tyrant of Athens, into taking revenge on the boy. Pisistratus, serene, deflected her wrath with a word of love.

Finally, we see Stephen, the first martyr, dying under a hail of stones. Dante’s description: “His eyes were open gates to heaven.” It is through those eyes that divine illumination flows, into his heart and out of his mouth, as a prayer for God to forgive his murderers. The Hollander translation has Dante describing the protomartyr’s face as having “a look that must unlock compassion.”

The visions end. Dante comes to himself. What’s wrong with you? Virgil says. You’ve been stumbling around in a daze. The pilgrim replies that he was so overcome by his ecstatic vision, one so powerful he could “scarcely move [his] legs.” Virgil replies that he knows exactly what Dante saw, and he only goaded him on so he would remember that his task is to keep pressing forward.

The importance of this moment in the journey is easy to overlook, but we had better linger to take its meaning. Dante the pilgrim had a revelation here, a series of imaginative visions that awakened him morally (it’s a neat irony that the ecstasy’s effect on Dante’s body was to weaken it temporarily). The visions were so powerful that the visionary, Dante, lost sense of time and control of himself; indeed, the last one, of the face of St. Stephen, serene and loving even as he died horribly, had such a powerful effect that it opened the locked doors of compassion. Dante the poet is showing us here the transformative power of mimesis — that is, the desire to be like someone else, overwhelming our hearts and converting our souls. He’s telling us that we must imaginatively enter into the stories of others, to make ourselves emotionally vulnerable to them, to allow them to enter into our intellect and change us.

This is what the future Pope Benedict XVI meant when, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he said that the best arguments for the truth of Christianity are not propositions and syllogisms, but Art and the Saints — that is, beauty, and holiness visible. Read the Holy Father’s reflection on the power of Beauty to reveal truth to us. In it, the pope quoted a 14th century Byzantine theologian, Nicholas Cabasilas, thus:

“When men have a longing so great that it surpasses human nature and eagerly desire and are able to accomplish things beyond human thought, it is the Bridegroom who has smitten them with this longing. It is he who has sent a ray of his beauty into their eyes. The greatness of the wound already shows the arrow which has struck home, the longing indicates who has inflicted the wound.”

What we desire, we wish to possess. What we see, and embrace in our imaginations, we shall come to be. If we fill our eyes and our minds with light, we will dwell in the light; if we fill it with darkness, we will dwell in darkness. This is not a pious platitude; this is reality.

Cardinal Ratzinger continued:

All too often arguments fall on deaf ears because in our world too many contradictory arguments compete with one another, so much so that we are spontaneously reminded of the medieval theologians’ description of reason, that it “has a wax nose”: In other words, it can be pointed in any direction, if one is clever enough. Everything makes sense, is so convincing, whom should we trust?

The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgment and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: “Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true.”

The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer’s inspiration. Isn’t the same thing evident when we allow ourselves to be moved by the icon of the Trinity of Rublëv? In the art of the icons, as in the great Western paintings of the Romanesque and Gothic period, the experience described by Cabasilas, starting with interiority, is visibly portrayed and can be shared.

In a rich way Pavel Evdokimov has brought to light the interior pathway that an icon establishes. An icon does not simply reproduce what can be perceived by the senses, but rather it presupposes, as he says, “a fasting of sight.” Inner perception must free itself from the impression of the merely sensible, and in prayer and ascetical effort acquire a new and deeper capacity to see, to perform the passage from what is merely external to the profundity of reality, in such a way that the artist can see what the senses as such do not see, and what actually appears in what can be perceived: the splendor of the glory of God, the “glory of God shining on the face of Christ ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

To admire the icons and the great masterpieces of Christian art in general, leads us on an inner way, a way of overcoming ourselves; thus in this purification of vision that is a purification of the heart, it reveals the beautiful to us, or at least a ray of it. In this way we are brought into contact with the power of the truth. I have often affirmed my conviction that the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth against every denial, are the saints, and the beauty that the faith has generated. Today, for faith to grow, we must lead ourselves and the persons we meet to encounter the saints and to enter into contact with the Beautiful.

Now however, we still have to respond to an objection. We have already rejected the assumption which claims that what has just been said is a flight into the irrational, into mere aestheticism.

Rather, it is the opposite that is true: This is the very way in which reason is freed from dullness and made ready to act.

You see? Virgil, the personification of Reason, could not share Dante’s ecstatic vision, but he knew that Dante had seen something true in his private revelation, and was reminding him that it was time now to act on what he had seen. We see the holy terror the artist possesses: the power to awaken men’s souls to hidden realities, and to guide their actions to the good, or to deceive them, and mislead them to evil. The pilgrim is coming to see why his old teacher, the damned scholar Brunetto Latini, who told Dante to keep following his own constellation, to worldly fame and glory, was so devastatingly wrong. The vocation of an artist comes with immense power, and immense responsibility. To whom much is given, much is expected.

And now, at the end of this canto, comes Dante’s time of testing:

Then gradually, a cloud of smoke took shape;

slowly it drifted toward us, dark as night;

we were not able to escape its grip.

It took away our sight, and the pure air.

They have entered into the choking, blinding cloud of Wrath. Fear not. As we go deeper into the Purgatorio, we live out with Dante the prophetic truth proclaimed by Dostoevsky: “Beauty will save the world.” God reveals Himself to us in his Word, certainly, but also in the saints and in art. I think as I write this about that evening three years ago, standing under an oak tree outside the Methodist church at my sister’s wake, not much more than a stone’s throw from where I sit tonight, I beheld the goodness of the people of this town, inspired to acts of charity by the love Ruthie, and my family, had shown them over the years. It was a revelation of the reality of God, just as my sister’s 19-month walk with cancer had been. The more light she received, the more she radiated, and the more it shone in the faces of those who looked upon her. When she died from the cancer, her lovely face was shrunken and gray, but the glow lasted in the faces of all who came to look on her body in the church that evening. I saw it too, and it changed my heart, and my life.

So did the theophany God gave me in the matchless art of Dante Alighieri, which healed me of a wound I had carried all my life. And now, I ask you to give an exhausted writer, who has been doing this straight for 13 hours, unable to stop telling you about Dante, the grace to say: How good God has been to me, in His saints and in His artists! Glory to Him for all things! I could write about this all night. It is a kind of ecstasy. You can’t put the kids to bed on wobbly legs.

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26 Responses to Purgatorio, Canto XV

I’ve been following the series with strong interest and gratitude. But the TED talk reference has me genuinely puzzled:

“I just found the molecule behind it. But knowing that molecule is valuable, because it tells us how to turn up this behavior and what turns it off. In particular, it tells us why we see immorality.” Huh? What happened to Free Will, as emphasized in Purgatorio XVI? Manipulate a few hormones and voila — Aristotelian virtue! Who needs mountain climbing with Virgil?

“So if I understood the chemistry of trustworthiness, I might help alleviate poverty.” Sure, let’s all get high and “end poverty.”

Oh, the irony. As if all Dante the pilgrim needs to become a better man, to become less envious, more generous, to get out of the dark wood, is an “oxytocin inhaler.” Maybe St. Mary had a really powerful “oxytocin inhaler.” Maybe someone really “turned up” her good behavior. Could it be that TED talks = the dark wood?

[NFR: I wouldn’t suggest that we all snort oxytocin and get rich. But I don’t see anything wrong with discovering a neurobiological basis for altruism. If there are sound biological reasons for behaving with charity, and sound sociological reasons too (because it builds social trust and increases the common good), how does that diminish the truth of what Christianity teaches? — RD]

So long as we don’t start worshipping the molecule rather than worshipping God, we should be good.

I don’t actually find Dante’s economic sense of Envy to be undermined by later economic discoveries. If anything, Dante’s argument (“Envy immiserates”) is rendered even more true by the evidence of low-trust societies being rampantly undermined by their own corruption.

Russia and Arabia are still poor for a reason. They don’t actually live their Faiths, but rather have predatory elites madly scrambling to hoard opulence as if it actually mattered. This hoarding and predatory practice, of course, undermines the very economy and society that makes their wealth possible, and puts the entire society on the road to poverty.

As I’ve been reading along, one thing has struck me about the penitents as they go up the mountain. They don’t seem to pray much.

I am a protestant (Anglican evangelical), so Dante’s world (and the concept of post-mortem purgation in general) is very alien to me. The penitents are often invoking the saints, or requesting the intercession of the living (either Dante, his contemporaries, and readers), but they never seem to petition God directly for themselves. Why is this? Am I just to assume they are doing this anyway?

I’m asking in order to understand, not to enter or spark some kind of debate here. If anyone can help me out here, I’d be very grateful.

[NFR: I just assumed they are doing this themselves. Remember, we do hear them singing Psalms and Scripture, which is a form of prayer. I seem to recall on one of these recent terraces, Dante encounters a figure who said he would pray for the souls back home. I’m guessing it wouldn’t make for good drama to have the penitents address God himself in private prayer instead of Dante, or denouncing the sinful on earth, as Guide del Duca does. — RD]

Christianity teaches the responsibility of the individual–each soul must earn its own salvation. You say, what’s wrong with a little help from our friends, drugs, the soma of Brave New World. I am concurrently rereading The Iliad where gods help out their favorites– is it Zeus or Achilles who is to be credited with tremendous martial feats? Substitute a drug for Zeus and you have the same problem.

[NFR: Well, a little theological correction here: Christianity teaches that it’s not possible to “earn” our salvation, strictly speaking; it’s a free gift. But we do have to repent, and lead lives of repentance. And this is hard. So, when we see the penitents engaged in ascetic labors, they’re not earning their salvation, but rather are making themselves more capable of receiving transformational grace. God’s free gift of salvation is what got them to the mountain in the first place; they work to climb it to perfect their repentance. Anyway, taking a drug so that one might behave better does nothing to help one’s salvation. A man who has earned a million dollars has a very different relationship to money than a man who has won the lottery. Still, I think it’s fascinating to find that there is in fact a neuroscientific basis undergirding the spiritual truth that Dante, through the mouth of Virgil, proclaims. The neurobiological truth does not obviate the spiritual truth, but rather complements it. — RD]

But I don’t see anything wrong with discovering a neurobiological basis for altruism. If there are sound biological reasons for behaving with charity, and sound sociological reasons too (because it builds social trust and increases the common good), how does that diminish the truth of what Christianity teaches? — RD]

I have just been skimming these Dante posts, but this really seems an abrupt about-face for you.. aren’t you the guy who regularly claims that there is no possible reason or rationale for moral behavior absent a firm commitment to God and First Principles, and atheists and seculars are just basically faking it while whistling past the graveyard… except when it can be explained by purely material neurological chemistry when need be? Somehow, I don’t think you would take a bunch of gobbledygook about oxytocin very seriously if it came from Sam Harris or Daniel Dennet.

[NFR: You’re wrong. I believe that humans thrive when we live in community, cooperatively. I also believe that we aren’t very good at doing what is in our best interest, consistently, because of our natures. If it were so obvious that we ought to be altruistic, why does it happen so infrequently? My point is not, and never has been, that behaving morally isn’t reasonable — after all, Virgil, in the Commedia, is more noble and good than any penitent Christian they meet in Purgatory — but rather it is impossible to behave well consistently without divine grace. Ask a recovering alcoholic how easy it is to do what is reasonably in their best interests, without the aid of their Higher Power. Besides, “being good” isn’t the point of Christianity. — RD]

I’ve been reading your stuff for close to a decade now. I have seen you repeatedly make the argument that a materialist basis for morality is impossible, explicitly and at length. If you can’t see how your sudden apparent enthusiasm for a materialist explanation for the basis of morality might strike people as odd, if not an outright concession to what people like Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett have been arguing for at least the past decade or so, then I guess I don’t really know what else to say.

[NFR: I don’t understand your point. I seriously don’t. Why should it surprise you that the way our bodies work might be consonant with spiritual truth? You seem to have a simplistic understanding of these things. Our bodily instincts tell us as males to have sex as often as we can. Our reason tells us that this is unwise. Our faith may give us the grace to resist our instinct, and to perfect the sexual instinct by channeling it to proper ends. Why is it an either-or? — RD]

[NFR: I don’t understand your point. I seriously don’t. Why should it surprise you that the way our bodies work might be consonant with spiritual truth? You seem to have a simplistic understanding of these things. Our bodily instincts tell us as males to have sex as often as we can. Our reason tells us that this is unwise. Our faith may give us the grace to resist our instinct, and to perfect the sexual instinct by channeling it to proper ends. Why is it an either-or? — RD]

With all due respect, you’ve been saying morality is an either/or proposition for as long as I’ve been reading you – EITHER you believe in God, and therefore have an ultimate grounding for objective morality; OR you don’t believe in God and have to make increasingly desperate hand-waving/”scientism” arguments about how morality arises from like neurochemistry and reciprocal altruism. I just find it incredibly strange to see you go all in for a supposed “moral molecule”. I mean read what you just said in your post:

He’s proved in the lab that the presence of oxytocin in the brain has dramatic effects on social trust and morality.

If Dr. Zak has proved – again, your words – under laboratory conditions that it is actually the relative amount and effect of a brain chemical that undergirds and directs our moral sensibilities, doesn’t that have some truly devastating implications for notions of free will, from a traditionally christian perspective? As andrew pointed out, why then bother reading Dante or The Bible – go get a prescription for how ever many milligrams of oxytocin you need to feel better and start treating others with empathy. Why bother with even trying to piggyback some metaphysical/supernatural explanation on top of what you just admitted was proven in a lab?

[NFR: Oxytocin undergirds and directs not all moral sensibilities, but those having to do with feelings that engender social trust. You sound like the sort of person who claims that evolutionary biology proves that God doesn’t exist. Do you not think that God may have provided a biological basis of at least some moral instincts? After all, in Dante, even Virgil, who did not believe in God, perfected himself in natural virtue. I’m still not getting your point. If a man worked hard, and through his work and wise stewardship of his resources, became a millionaire, there would be a qualitative difference between what he had achieved, and the achievement of a man who won his million in the lottery. The hardworking man will have a different character, and a different soul. — RD]

Well, I think we’re just talking past each other at this point, but I’ll try it one more time: To put it another way, if our morality is largely reducible to brain chemistry, as Dr. Zak’s work seems to imply, (and you seem to agree, at least in part) then I think it becomes rather more difficult to argue against the proposition that Christianity (or any other religion for that matter) is anything other than a “just-so” cultural story, grafted onto an underlying materialist/biological reality. I mean, whatever gets you through the night, and if you get some enjoyment and meaning out of contemplating Dante or the Gospels, then have at it, but it just seems like an un-necessary extra step, given what you’ve just admitted about the effects of oxytocin. And if oxytocin isn’t all that’s needed to account for moral behavior, then where do you suppose that God fits into this equation? Do you really not see how you are turning this into just another God-of-the-Gaps argument?

[NFR: No, I don’t. Feelings of social trust generated by in-group altruism do not tell us whether or not the group is pursuing moral ends. Seriously, I imagine that there was lots of oxytocin whooshing through the brains of attendees of Nuremberg rallies, and that these feelings helped solidify the sense of solidarity and social trust among the group. That doesn’t tell us whether or not the oxytocined Nazis were oriented toward the Good, only that they were selfless in their relations to each other. — RD]

NFR: No, I don’t. Feelings of social trust generated by in-group altruism do not tell us whether or not the group is pursuing moral ends. Seriously, I imagine that there was lots of oxytocin whooshing through the brains of attendees of Nuremberg rallies, and that these feelings helped solidify the sense of solidarity and social trust among the group. That doesn’t tell us whether or not the oxytocined Nazis were oriented toward the Good, only that they were selfless in their relations to each other. — RD

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Therefore, oxytocin is not “the moral molecule”, it’s more like the “good-feelings/in-group-trust” molecule. But then that sort of steals the thunder from your original argument about how Dante pre-figured all this scientific insight into morality 700 years ago, doesn’t it? People who are in the same social group are more likely to trust one another? That’s news? Didn’t Jesus say something about how even the pagans are good to their own?

I guess I just don’t understand why you even brought it (oxytocin) up in the context of a discussion about Dante.

[NFR: Well, the term “moral molecule” is Paul Zak’s not mine. I don’t think that the existence or non-existence of oxytocin is dispositive one way or the other regarding the moral validity of Christ’s teachings on charity. I brought it up to note that there is a biological basis for claiming that showing charity to others increases love inside oneself, and within others. You may not have read the Canto XIV entry closely, but the context here is a discussion of the destruction of the community via Envy. The Commedia is also a political poem, one in which Dante, who watched civil war destroy communities in which he lived, philosophized about the nature of community, and what causes them to fall apart. He is exploring here the connection between private virtue and public morality. He does so in a broad Christian theological context. It is interesting to observe that to give an opening to love produces certain biological effects that are pro-social. It seems to me to be a false choice to say that the moral sense is *either* entirely a matter of brain chemistry, *or* totally disconnected from biology. The classical Christian teaching is that we are incarnated souls, not ghosts in the machine. We are Christians, not Gnostics. — RD]

Re: Russia and Arabia are still poor for a reason. They don’t actually live their Faiths, but rather have predatory elites madly scrambling to hoard opulence as if it actually mattered.

I won’t go to bat for the despicable Persian Gulf societies, but Russia’s elites are arguably less predatory than our own. Russia’s Gini coefficient is currently around 42, compared with 45 for America.

Re: I am a protestant (Anglican evangelical), so Dante’s world (and the concept of post-mortem purgation in general) is very alien to me.

Not to take away from Derek’s faith, but it should be noted that Anglicanism tolerates a range of beliefs about purgatory, and there are Anglicans who do believe strongly in purgatory or its close equivalent.

There is a game called chess. It is composed of pieces moving about on a board in accordance with rules. It is not reducible to its pieces, in the sense that the play of one piece in chess is dependent on its relation to the other pieces in chess. Remove the rooks, and you have a different “game” (or at least, a different set of strategies).

There is a piece designated a king. The token is generally composed of physical matter. If you made a king out of butter, it would not practically function as a token. At the same time, if you studied the physical properties of the token, nothing would indicate that it was, in fact, a king. Physics cannot establish that it is a king.

What a person is, in some sense, is related to a communal system of meaning. An act of will, say jumping into a cold pond, is an act of will based on its accordance with certain conventions of language relating to the use of “willing.” Typically, we would not say scratching your nose while speaking is an act of will (but we would probably say it is a voluntary action) whereas quitting smoking would be (and “willing not to do something” not a thing).

Without getting into the nature of the soul, etc., love is a social act, and is only comprehensible through understanding a relationship of persons, just as a check mate is only understandable through understanding a relationship of chess pieces. Physics cannot explain whether the king is really in check mate or not (or even if it is really a king), nor if love is true.

The fact that there is a biological and physical basis for human behavior does not entail an “explanation” any more than the fact that there is a biological and physical basis for the token nominated a king. Science answers the question how, and can answer the question of the physical composition of a material thing, but not the question of what the whole is (in relationship to other wholes), nor what its purpose is. We get efficient and material causes, but no formal or final causes from science.

If we are good proponents of scientism, then we can say the game of chess doesn’t really exist, love doesn’t really exist (or we can equate it with sensation like a good silly empiricist), persons don’t really exist, etc. That is to say, scientism may be “true” in the metaphysical sense of what God sees looking down from the clouds, but in a pragmatic sense, it is a totally useless philosophy, as it negates almost the totality of ordinary human life.

One of the limits of Darwinism is that what an animal desires to eat and mate with is in some sense a reflection of choice. Animals have clear food preferences, and clear mating preferences, but these emerge out of a complex, inter-related social matrix, and are arbitrary from the standpoint of physics (just as the convention to call a physical thing a king is also arbitrary). “Natural selection” includes a teleological dimension, and so it is an entirely different type of theory from say, physics. In the evolution of life, we can see a manifestation of eros which is absent from physics.

To clarify, my comment above was less about Rod’s point and more about Paul Zak and his TED talk language — the kind of scientistic progressive language that promises to end violent crime with gene therapy, to end poverty by manipulating hormones, etc. I recall one commenter at NYT.com writing about becoming more patient and virtuous by smoking pot…. Dante and St. Thomas and Aristotle would have none of this mechanistic nonsense.

In any case, Rod’s main point was that we are embodied souls, and I wholeheartedly agree.

KD, I don’t mean to start a hijack-tangent, but I can’t let your assertion about the “limits of Darwinism”: animal behavior is never a matter of choice. Humans with our unique ability for abstract reasoning is the only such example of all the animals on the planet (necessary caveat: that we know of for certain at this point).

The ability to describe some animals and their behaviors under a term like “inter-related social matrix” cannot have a valid connection to nor form a valid analogy to humans. Choice and desire when applied to animals is generally a false projection of human cognition on those animals.

I know this comment would more properly fit with an earlier Purgatorio entry on the work arising in the context of a world that was falling apart, but it occurs to me to add this link to offer more context for readers who are following the Purgatorio entries. Most half-educated people in the West are somewhat aware of the Black Death, even if they couldn’t pinpoint it’s revival in the West to the mid-14th century, after Dante’s time. But relatively few educated people are aware of the significant dislocation caused by the end of the the Medieval Warm Period that gave birth to the world to which Dante was an eloquent testifier: the 300-year Little Ice Age and its first great calamity, the Great Famine:

“Choice and desire when applied to animals is generally a false projection of human cognition on those animals.”

Or, a metaphor. There is no strict convention in this context. But I do recall scientific studies being reported as rats “choosing” to inject themselves with cocaine over food, etc., and dogs do prefer eating the chocolate cake on the counter over the dog food, etc. Its what you want to say. Animals have behavioral preferences for mates and food, and what they actually eat is related to their preferences and the availability.

I’ve fallen behind . . . both because Rod posts at such a phenomenal rate, and because I find myself somewhat flummoxed by the recent entanglement of Dantean themes with social commentary. I suppose it’s inevitable. (Rolls up sleeves)

If it were so obvious that we ought to be altruistic, why does it happen so infrequently? It is not at all clear to me that altruism is infrequent. If parents, teachers, medical staff, first responders, etc. did not behave altruistically with some reliability, none of us would be here. Quite a few panhandlers survive solely on the unforced charity of passers-by. And look at the vigorous tradition of non-profits and church-sponsored organizations that rely on volunteer work and donations to provide services free of charge to those in need.

“being good” isn’t the point of Christianity. I can see why this might be true, if “being good” were construed as following a set of rules, or checking oneself against standards and awarding points. But, if being good means literally having goodness as one’s means of being, incorporating the goodness inherent in the nature of Jesus into one’s own heart . . . well, then, if “being good” in that sense isn’t the point of Christianity, what in Heaven’s name IS the point?

To return to Dante–Robert Heinlein seems to have stolen a good deal of this for use in Stranger in a Strange Land. “Water divided is water multiplied.” The light of generosity fills us with delight in the good enjoyed by others, and eagerness to share our own. I think it’s interesting that as soon as Dante receives the light of the angel and has the stigma of Envy cleansed from his brow, he is once again deprived of sight by the smoke of Wrath. Anger, like envy, makes us feel we can’t be happy till someone else is made to suffer. I’m looking forward to the discussion of this canto because Wrath is not only one of my own besetting sins, but one that, like Pride, is often portrayed in a positive light by society in general.

Dr. Zak mentions Adam Smith and describes him as a moral philosopher, which is true.

But Adam Smith also understood that rule of law and protection of property rights are the primary underpinnings of wealth and prosperity.

Rule of law and protection of property foster trust – that contracts will be upheld, that wealth can be passed on, that there are legal remedies to breach of contract and abuse of property, etc. The resultant explosion of economic transactions (conducted with trust, protected by rule of law) creates wealth and prosperity.

In turn, in countries with rule of law, one must be trustworthy in order to become and remain prosperous; because in general where the rule of law is upheld, corruption and criminality will neither generate wealth nor be tolerated by society or government.

So per Smith, I would say that trust and prosperity certainly correlate, but they are both made possible by rule of law. I hope Dr. Zak is able to discover this as well in his quest for the chemistry of trustworthiness.

RD:

In other words, the more you invest in caritas, the more you and others prosper spiritually, and the more everyone prospers materially. This isn’t theology, or at least isn’t only theology; it’s also science.

If it’s science, it should be testable. How does caritas fit into the picture? Are there poor societies with historically high rates (for lack of a better word) of caritas? Are there materially wealthy societies with historically low rates of caritas? If so, caritas > material wealth may not turn out to be the case.

It could be the opposite: we may find more instances of caritas in societies where people are politically and economically oppressed and are thus more dependent upon charity to survive.

Or prosperity and caritas may turn out to correlate, but as with prosperity and trust (if I am correct above), both in fact flow from another causative factor.

Just some thoughts. I am new to your blog (found it via The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, which I am currently reading) and am enjoying the discussion.

KD: No worries. I tend to get a bit ireful when people make statements under the aegis of Science that depart from its methodology, even slightly. I’m an uncredentialed student of the human condition, and behavioral sciences fascinate me. FYI: my previous post was done from my phone. I dislike forced brevity. 🙂